Stanley Rosen, director of the East Asian Studies Center at USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said that neither Chinese language nor other foreign language films, with very rare exceptions, made inroads in the North American market, even if they had Hollywood stars.

For example, Zhang Yimou cast Christian Bale in The Flowers of War in 2011 and Feng Xiaogang Adrien Brody in Back to 1942, but neither film was well received at the North American box office.

The cultural difference is the most important reason for the poor performance of Chinese films, Rosen said.

"Chinese period epics are unfamiliar to Western audiences: the drama, romance and comedy of a developing country isn’t always relevant to the world," he added.

Jiang Yanming, president of China Lion, which has distributed 30 Chinese films in North America, stressed the difficulty of overcoming the language barrier.

"North American audiences are not used to reading subtitles. This is also the reason why action films are still the most popular genre of Chinese films overseas," he said.

Some Chinese filmmakers have been exploring better ways to approach their international audiences.

Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai made The Grandmaster, the story of Bruce Lee’s mentor Ip Man, 22 minutes shorter when releasing it in the United States in August. He added inter-titles to explain Chinese history and onscreen identification of characters.

The film was heavily promoted, with front-page reviews and full and half-page advertisements over several days in the New York Times.

Wong and the film were written about extensively in the Los Angeles Times and movie legends Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson endorsed the film.

It has grossed $3.6 million, a very decent income for a Chinese film in the US. But this paled in comparison to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. Both grossed more than $50 million.

Rosen suggested Chinese filmmakers should not worry about soft power through films at present.

Jiang remains optimistic.

He has been developing a script based on an incident in San Francisco in the 1980s, when a Chinese noodle shop and an Italian pasta restaurant went head-to-head.

His company lost $4 million in the first two years distributing Chinese films in North America. But he is unbowed.

"It needs time to find a good story that audiences identify with," he said.

His optimism stems from the fact that he believes talent and expertise will win through in the end and besides, the industry is about happy endings.